I've had the strangest problem recently. I re-installed XP Home, all
went smoothly. I added each new app that I needed one at a time,
testing them to make sure they worked. Again, all went smoothly. Most
of this I installed from CD. The last thing to go on my computer was
going to be Nero. I had just done a bunch of online downloads and
installs (iTunes, Cygwin, JDK, Eclipse, & OpenOffice) and disabled some
of the services I always disabled (indexing, error reporting and a few
others) so it was time to put in the Nero disc.

I had disabled autorun for VMWare player, so I didn't expect the
installer to pop up, but opened "My Computer". There were no CD drives
there. I checked the "Device Manager" it recognizes both of my DVD
Drives and has the appropriate driver but a yellow ! by each one. I
grabbed the drivers off the net and reinstalled them. No difference.
I tried updating the drivers, removing the devices and adding them
again, all to no avail. One is an external Lite-On DVD burner (USB &
Firewire, I tried them both) and the other is an internal QSI
DVD-Rom/CD-RW.

I am really stumped. I'd rather not re-install Windows again just for
this, so if the good people here have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
Thanks

Sean

And the error message in Device manager was?

jambarama@gmail.com wrote:

> I've had the strangest problem recently. I re-installed XP Home, all
> went smoothly. I added each new app that I needed one at a time,
> testing them to make sure they worked. Again, all went smoothly. Most
> of this I installed from CD. The last thing to go on my computer was
> going to be Nero. I had just done a bunch of online downloads and
> installs (iTunes, Cygwin, JDK, Eclipse, & OpenOffice) and disabled some
> of the services I always disabled (indexing, error reporting and a few
> others) so it was time to put in the Nero disc.
>
> I had disabled autorun for VMWare player, so I didn't expect the
> installer to pop up, but opened "My Computer". There were no CD drives
> there. I checked the "Device Manager" it recognizes both of my DVD
> Drives and has the appropriate driver but a yellow ! by each one. I
> grabbed the drivers off the net and reinstalled them. No difference.
> I tried updating the drivers, removing the devices and adding them
> again, all to no avail. One is an external Lite-On DVD burner (USB &
> Firewire, I tried them both) and the other is an internal QSI
> DVD-Rom/CD-RW.
>
> I am really stumped. I'd rather not re-install Windows again just for
> this, so if the good people here have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
> Thanks
>
> Sean
>

There was no error message. A yellow exclamation mark, but I couldn't
get it to tell me what was wrong. I am quite sure the drivers
installed are right. In any case I did solve the problem.

I had uninstalled the device from the hardware
manager a number of times, but never from the registry. Not sure why
it had a different result, but it did. I went to:
/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Class/{4d36e965-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}

I removed REG_MULTI_SZ data type UpperFilters, and REG_MULTI_SZ data
type lowerFilters wasn't there. I rebooted and Windows picked up both
my devices.

Someone suggested that it was a conflict with virtual drive. That the
virtual drive software was insisting on using the first letter after
the letters of the hard drive partitions. I can't be sure this was
the case, since it was suggested after it got fixed, but it very well
could have been.

Thanks!